The advent of multi-core processors revamped the research on parallel computing, among others in the area of real-time media and audio processing. Indeed, the added calculating power offers application developers new opportunities for high-performance computing, but demands for new approaches in application design. In this paper we perform an initial investigation of a systematic parallelization and optimization method, based on a layered application model. This approach will aid in the identification of potential candidates for parallelism and finding an optimal solution in a potentially very large and complex design space.